by Conrad Black
Quebec, Manitoba, and Newfoundland all challenged the federal plan to patriate the Constitution without reference to the provinces, and the issue eventually went to the Supreme Court of Canada in 1981. The high court ruled that the proposed federal action did affect provincial rights and powers and that convention required substantial provincial consent, but that there was no legal prohibition against the federal Parliament asking Westminster to amend the BNA Act without the consent of the provinces. Like much else in Canadian federal affairs, it was ambiguous and was seen by all as a cautionary signal, and Trudeau pledged to give conciliation and negotiation one more try.
The federal and provincial leaders met on November 2. There was no progress, and as the conference seemed destined to break up, Trudeau suggested that patriation be agreed, because no one could possibly object to that, with two years allowed to sort out other differences, failing which the whole issue could be put to a referendum. He turned to Lévesque and said that Lévesque was the great plebiscitary democrat. “You can’t be opposed to a referendum, or are you opposed to taking me on?” Trudeau asked. Lévesque took the bait and agreed spontaneously. Trudeau hailed it as a Quebec-Ottawa alliance and said, “The cat is among the pigeons.” He spoke with authority; he was the cat. The seven other members of the fractured Gang of Eight were not prepared to fight a referendum on Trudeau’s charter, and Lévesque retracted his acceptance. In the greatest day of his long career, Jean Chrétien persuaded Trudeau not to adjourn the conference and navigated between the disconcerted provincial delegations. With Ontario and Saskatchewan and Newfoundland officials, he produced a proposal that would give Trudeau his charter but with a right of provinces to nullify federal judicial interpretations that infringed their prerogatives. The amending formula of seven provinces with 50 per cent of the population was accepted, so there would be no veto for Quebec or Ontario, nor any compensation for provinces that opted out of federal programs in areas of provincial jurisdiction. (Lévesque had demanded compensation for opting out, and Trudeau had endorsed vetoes for Ontario and Quebec.) It was a considerable feat of swift negotiation by Chrétien.
Trudeau declined the proposal because of the provincial nullification right, which became known as the “notwithstanding clause,” but Premier Davis telephoned him at 10:30 that evening and said that Ontario could not support the federal appeal to the British Parliament without this compromise. Trudeau feared that matters could plod on indefinitely until his term came to an end. He knew he could not drag this through another election, and was under no illusions about his ability to come back from yet another appointment with the voters for a fifth term. It was now or never, this or nothing, and he took the deal after layering in a five-year sunset on invocations of the notwithstanding clause and an exclusion for cultural minority rights. (Chrétien later prevailed upon Trudeau to agree to compensation when Quebec opted out in matters of education and culture – a posthumous win for Duplessis on the university grants issue, from three of his most vocal young adversaries, Trudeau, Lévesque, and Chrétien – and provincial control over immigrants’ access to minority education in Quebec.)
This dramatic turn of events came as a shocking blow to Lévesque, who called it, in a reference to Hitler’s massacre of some of his own SA Brownshirts in 1934, “the night of the long knives” and refused Trudeau’s invitation to make it unanimous. Trudeau rather ungraciously blamed Chrétien for the notwithstanding clause, rather than crediting him with the redemption of his long battle for constitutional patriation, an amending formula, and a Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. It was to Chrétien’s further credit that he was saddened by the isolation of his native province, and at the end he and his provincial analogues as justice minister, Roy Romanow of Saskatchewan (NDP) and Roy McMurtry of Ontario (Progressive Conservative), earned Canada’s gratitude for producing a decision and delivering the country from another round in the interminable constitutional charade. Their agreement was not complete, of course, but it was progress, and not just in constitutional terms.
Lévesque pleaded with his former colleagues in the Gang of Eight to “please give me back my right of veto” (though he didn’t really need it with the notwithstanding clause). He does not deserve more than the nostalgic and comradely sympathy that Chrétien extended to him; he was not bargaining in good faith, and he was sleeping soundly in the complacent assurance of having helped derail yet another attempt to make Canada work when the deal was struck and it suddenly did work, as it always has, at the last and least probable extremity of events. The whole separatist game of étapisme, and of pretending to play the English-Canadian role of good-faith negotiation when they were just going through the motions and running out the clock, was discreditable. Queen Elizabeth proclaimed the new Constitution Act on April 17, 1982, on Parliament Hill in an elaborate public ceremony.
Lévesque limped out of Ottawa speaking darkly of the “incalculable consequences” of what he represented as the betrayal of Quebec. Canada was no longer risibly, in the eyes of its domestic and foreign skeptics, dependent on any other country even formally for ratification of its constitutional development, and Lévesque’s effort to move like a fox among the sheep of the other premiers had been debunked. Trudeau had won, and it was a great victory for the country and the substantial fulfilment of what he had been recruited to federal politics and elevated to the headship of his party and the government to do. But it was his parting trumpet. The balance of his term was an anti-climax, as he devoted his last two years to the faddish hobby horses of his prolonged and comfortably idle youth.
In medical care, originally a provincial field, the Pearson government had put up half the funding to assist the provinces in adopting universal health-care systems. As these became steadily more expensive to operate, the federal share declined to less than a quarter of the total, but in 1984 Trudeau advised his health minister, Monique Bégin, to ignore the wishes of the provinces and doctors and ban extra billing, which then amounted to about $100 million a year. The result was that each year for about five years, Canada lost to emigration (almost all to the United States) more than half as many doctors as it graduated, which only made health care scarcer and more expensive. Canadians inexplicably became so preoccupied with health care that they convinced themselves that it was superior to the American system (and therefore likely the best in the world), and thus it became a raison d’être of the country as independent vis-à-vis the United States. It was superior to the American system in that it took better care of the lowest-earning 30 per cent of the population. But for the other 70 per cent, it was an inferior system, and was, in any case, a ludicrous explanation for the country’s existence. By implacably and inflexibly opposing private medicine, Trudeau was abusing the federal government’s position as a junior jurisdictional and financial partner in medical care and ensuring the increasing rationing of medical care in the unworthy names of uniformity of service and universality of benefit. By means-testing out those not in need of financial assistance and allowing private medicine to use hospital facilities out of hours and to bill opted-out patients, the progressive deterioration of the health-care system would have been avoided. Trudeau’s influence in this area was negative.
Trudeau’s last flourishes in foreign affairs were trendy nonsense: a “North–South” dialogue, as if there were the slightest legitimacy to examining development issues in that light; and a personal peace initiative, a completely fatuous enterprise. His peace initiative was unveiled on October 27, 1983, and consisted of proposals for a comprehensive ban on nuclear tests and the testing of high-altitude weapons, a five-nation conference on arms control, and a mechanism for enhancing consultations between NATO and the Warsaw Pact countries. As the sun set on his regime, Trudeau trundled himself around to the five original nuclear powers (Israel did not test or acknowledge that it possessed nuclear weapons) and to eighteen other capitals, including such epicentres of geopolitical influence as East Berlin and Bucharest, and made no headway at all. He had
reduced military personnel by 20 per cent and military expenses as a percentage of GDP by 50 per cent. His plan was dismissed in Washington by a prominent commentator with the words “He doesn’t have enough country for his ambitions,”25 The ban on high-altitude weapons was directed against President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), an entirely defensive, non-nuclear, space-based anti-missile defence system using laser technology. This was the project which, more than any other single policy or event, ended the Cold War satisfactorily and ushered in an era of increased international nuclear security and arms reductions, at least among the major powers.
Since Trudeau saw no moral distinction between the Soviet Union and the United States, wore Canada’s founding and consistent Western Alliance status lightly, professed to believe that Roosevelt and Churchill had legitimized Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe (when in fact Stalin pledged democracy and independence for those countries), and developed the most exaggerated admiration for Fidel Castro and his retrograde totalitarian despotism in Cuba, it was not surprising that his peace initiative was a woolly neutralist proposal to talk up the status quo of mutually assured destruction and confer a completely unearned influence on third parties to the superpower rivalry. It was a sophomoric effort to give himself some imagined standing as a semi-neutralist. When Trudeau visited Cuba in 1976, Castro dragooned a crowd of 250,000 to cheer him, and Trudeau praised the new Siberian city of Norilsk, although it was built by victims of the Soviet Gulag and is one of the most polluted cities in the world. Trudeau had no sympathy for Soviet dissidents, and referred to Andrei Sakharov and Anatoly Sharansky as “hooligans.” He happily gave Castro landing rights in Newfoundland in the transportation of Cuban soldiers to and from the Angolan Civil War, where they were Soviet mercenaries. Reagan’s SDI threatened the Soviet Union with the substantial ineffectuality of its entire first-strike threat, and the inadequacy, for strategic purposes, of its consecration of between a third and a half of Soviet GDP to military strength, and began the entire implosion of the U.S.S.R. and of international communism, to Trudeau’s astonishment and scarcely muted disappointment.
Trudeau did better with cultural policy, increasing support for the Canada Council by 13 per cent annually for the last decade of his time in office, and building the splendid new National Gallery and the imposing Canadian Museum of Civilization. For the national capital, he was an outstanding and munificent leader, greatly improving the quality of public buildings and cleaning up the tawdry cross-river city of Hull, Quebec. His efforts to regulate television cablecasting, Canadian content in licenced media, and foreign periodicals were not very successful, frequently unjust, and generally gamed by ingenious and politically connected licence-applicants.
Trudeau’s economic record was poor. To some extent, he was the victim of macroeconomic events, and some of his heavy deficitory expenses were the result of his ultimately successful war on Quebec separatism, but they do not entirely, or even largely, excuse the fact that from 1968 to 1984 the federal accumulated debt rose from $19.4 to $194.4 billion (25.5 per cent of GDP to 43.2 per cent); unemployment rose from 4.5 per cent to 11.2 per cent; the annual budgetary deficit rose from 0.9 per cent of GDP to 8.3 per cent; and federal spending rose from 17 per cent to 24.2 per cent of an inflation-bloated GDP. Inflation, spurred by 15.5 per cent annual federal spending increases, was the highest among all developed nations over this period, and the Canadian dollar fell 17 per cent against the U.S. dollar, 47 per cent against the Japanese yen, and 68 per cent against the Deutschmark. He did not reduce poverty and as a percentage of the country’s population annual immigration was reduced by half between 1968–1984. Like most people who have never run anything more challenging than a two-car funeral, Trudeau assumed that decreeing that things must happen, creating portentously named agencies and commissions in the French manner to accomplish complex tasks, and throwing money at problems would accomplish the desired results, and he left a flabby and top-heavy governmental infestation of superfluous meddlers and authoritarian interlopers irritating an unprecedented number and variety of Canadians at great ongoing cost to the country. Trudeau’s Third Option, to promote economic relations with countries other than the United States, was a complete failure.
Trudeau had promised in 1980 when he came back from his briefly declared retirement that he would retire well before the end of another term, if he were elected to one. By the time he had traipsed around the world peddling his stillborn peace initiative, there was not a year to go in the mandate. He had hung on by his fingernails in 1972 and come back only thanks to Joe Clark’s lack of aptitude as a political leader in 1979, but now all indications showed that the country, if given the opportunity, would propel him at great velocity into retirement and posterity by the scruff of the neck and the small of the back. This was doubly the case because Clark had compounded his errors of 1979 and 1980 by calling a leadership vote at a party conference in January 1983 and declaring that he would call for a full leadership convention if he did not secure the support of 70 per cent of the delegates. He received the support of 66.9 per cent of those voting, after a hilarious campaign of competitive stuffing of instant and specially paid Conservative card-carrying members into the convention hall in Winnipeg.*
This would normally be quite enough support to carry on, and Clark was leading Trudeau in the polls, but he was caught by his unwise promise of a 70 per cent threshold, and at the ensuing convention in June, Brian Mulroney, the surviving runner-up from 1976 (as Wagner had died), edged past Clark and was selected leader of the Opposition on the fourth ballot, 1,584 votes to 1,325. The colourful Newfoundlander John Crosbie ran a strong third. Clark was a man of estimable qualities but had not been an effective leader, though he did defeat Trudeau. He remained in public life and would acquit himself with distinction in high office. Brian Mulroney (b. 1939), now forty-four, was the first really bilingual leader in the history of his party and the first to be intimately acquainted with Quebec politically. He had not stood for elective office but had been a respected labour lawyer and royal commissioner and head of a large mining company (Iron Ore Company of Canada), and he was a Progressive Conservative insider with twenty years’ experience in the trenches and backrooms. He was young and presentable, was quickly elected in Nova Scotia in a constituency cleared for him, and presented a mortal threat to the Liberals. He was the first conservative to challenge the Liberal federal grip on Quebec since the death of Sir John A. Macdonald in 1891. It was clear after a few weeks in Parliament that he was a capable leader well formed in the Quebec tradition, un chef.
In all of the circumstances, Trudeau decided to take his leave, and he announced this decision on February 29, 1984. His was the most uneven performance in office of any Canadian prime minister. By all the traditional criteria of evaluation – quality of fiscal, economic, social, and foreign policy – Pierre Trudeau’s record was mediocre, although he possessed great flair and remarkable qualities of leadership, and was often courageous, always formidable, and frequently eloquent and very witty. He was un chef, and everyone knew it. More important, the traditional method of evaluation that elevates Macdonald, Laurier, and King to the rank of great prime ministers, and St. Laurent to an only slightly less exalted category, is an unjust yardstick in Trudeau’s case. He was called to public life and great public office in a national emergency to take on the task of dealing with a Quebec independentist problem that had been allowed to fester for fifteen years and had achieved very dangerous proportions before it was even dimly perceived by the Pearson government (and its implications were never remotely grasped by John Diefenbaker).
By early 1984, it was clear that the great separatist drive was blunted and in retreat. Robert Bourassa had been re-elected Quebec Liberal leader after the retirement of Claude Ryan and was leading in the polls. René Lévesque was a spent force. The country had a new Constitution with a Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which would have a very mixed impact on Canadian society but demonstrated that federalism w
as not as sclerotic as its nationalist Quebec critics had represented; the Conservatives had a completely bicultural Quebec leader and the federal government was pouring money into Quebec through the doors and windows while over a million English-Canadian schoolchildren outside Quebec studied French as a second language. French was available in the electronic media, was on packaging, and was used in federal government services everywhere in Canada. Canada had responded to Quebec’s concerns constructively, and 60 per cent of Quebeckers had refused even to authorize their provincial government to try to negotiate new arrangements with the federal government.
In the great challenge and purpose of his political career, Trudeau had succeeded where no one else would have. Lévesque would have smeared and fleeced Stanfield and Clark, who could never have been able to bring the fiscal and intellectual artillery to bear on the problem that Trudeau did; nor could Trudeau’s rivals for the succession to Pearson in 1968, with the possible exception of John Turner. Robert Winters and the others either knew nothing of the problem or, like Paul Martin, were vieux jeu, passé. John Turner knew Quebec well, spoke French fairly well, and would have approached the problem with originality, but it is hard to believe he would have been as fierce a defender of federalism as Trudeau, and he could not have pulled as much support among the Québécois. Trudeau’s successors cleaned up the damage he inflicted in fiscal and social policy and foreign relations while retaining the benefit of what he achieved for national unity.
